Meanwhile the king had in 1185 made a further attempt at a permanent settlement of the distracted island. John was formally appointed king over Ireland, and accompanied by Glanville, landed in Waterford on the 25th of April. His coming with a new batch of Norman followers completed the misfortunes of the first settlers. The Norman-Welsh knights of the border had by painful experience learned among their native woods and mountains how to wage such war as was needed in Ireland-a kind of war where armour was worse than useless, where strength was of less account than agility, where days and nights of cold and starvation were followed by impetuous assaults of an enemy who never stood long enough for a decisive battle, a war where no mercy was given and no captives taken. On the other hand, their half Celtic blood had made it easy for them to mingle with the Irish population, to marry and settle down among them. But the followers of John were Norman and French knights, accustomed to fight in full armour upon the plains of France; and to add to a rich pay the richer profits of plunder and of ransom. The seaport towns and the castles fell into the hands of new masters, untrained to the work required of them. "Wordy chatterers, swearers of enormous oaths, despisers of others," as they seemed to the race of Nesta's descendants, the new rulers of the country proved mere plunderers, who went about burning, slaying, and devastating, while the old soldiery of the first conquest were despised and cast aside. Divisions of race which in England had quite died out were revived in Ireland in their full intensity; and added to the two races of the Irish and the Danes we now hear of the three hostile groups into which the invaders were broken—the Normans, the English, and the men of the Welsh border. To the new comers the natives were simply barbarians. When the Irish princes came to do homage, their insolent king pulled their long beards in ridicule; at the outrage they turned their backs on the English camp, and the other kings hearing their tale, refused to do fealty. Any allies who still remained were alienated by being deprived of the lands which the first invaders had left them. Even the newly-won Church was thrown into opposition by interference with its freedom and plunder of its lands; the ancient custom of carrying provisions to the churches for safe keeping in troubled times was contemptuously ignored when a papal legate gave the English armies leave to demand the opening of the church doors, and the sale of such provisions as they chose to require. There were complaints too in the country of the endless lawsuits that now sprang up, probably from the infinite confusion that grew out of the attempt to override Irish by English law. But if Glanville tried any legal experiments in Ireland, his work was soon interrupted. Papal legates arrived in England at Christmas 1186 to crown the King of Ireland with the crown of peacocks' feathers woven with gold which the Pope himself had sent. But John never wore his diadem of peacocks' feathers. Before it had arrived he had been driven from the country.

Thus ended the third and last attempt in Henry's reign to conquer Ireland. The strength and the weakness of the king's policy had alike brought misery to the land. The nation was left shattered and bleeding; its native princes weakened in all things save in the habits of treachery and jealousy; its Danish traders driven into exile; its foreign conquerors with their ranks broken, and their hope turned to bitterness. The natural development of the tribal system was violently interrupted by the half-conquest of the barons and the bringing in of a feudal system, for which the Irish were wholly unprepared. But the feudal conquerors themselves were only the remnants of a broken and defeated party, the last upholders of a tradition of conquest and of government of a hundred years earlier. Themselves trembling before the coming in of a new order of things, they could destroy the native civilization, but they could set nothing in its place. There remained at last only the shattered remnants of two civilizations which by sheer force were maintained side by side. Their fusion was perhaps impossible, but it was certainly rendered less possible by the perplexed and arbitrary interferences of later rulers in England, almost as foreign to the Anglo-Irish of the Pale as to the native tribes who, axe in hand and hidden in bog and swamp and forest, clung desperately to the ancient traditions and inheritance of their forefathers.



CHAPTER IX

REVOLT OF THE BARONAGE

All hope of progress, of any wise and statesmanlike settlement of Ireland, utterly died away when, on Easter night, 16th April 1172, Henry sailed from Wexford. The next morning he landed near St. David's. He entered its gates as a pilgrim, on foot and staff in hand, while the monks came out in solemn procession to lead him to the ancient church on the other side of the river. Suddenly a Welsh woman sprang out from among the crowd, and striking her hands together wildly, threw herself at his feet crying with a loud voice, "Avenge us to-day, Lechlavar! Avenge the people of this land!" The woman's bitter cry told the first thought of all the thronging multitudes of eager Welshmen that day, how Merlin had prophesied that an English king, the conqueror of Ireland, should die on Lechlavar, a great stone which formed a rude natural bridge across the stream, and round which the pagan superstitions of an immemorial past still clung. When the strange procession reached the river, Henry stood for a moment looking steadily at the stone, then with a courage which we can scarcely measure, he firmly set his foot on it and slowly crossed over; and from the other side, in the face of all the people he turned and flung his taunt at the prophet, "Who will ever again believe the lies of Merlin?" As he passed through Cardiff another omen met him; a white-robed monk stood before him as he came out of church. "God hold thee, Cuning!" he cried in the English tongue, and broke out into passionate warnings of evil to come unless the king would show more reverence to the Sunday, a matter about which there was at this time a great stirring of religious feeling. "Ask this rustic," said Henry in French to a knight who held his rein, "whether he has dreamed this." The monk turned from the interpreter to the king and spoke again: "Whether I have dreamed this or no, mark this day, for unless thou amendest thy life, before this year has passed thou shalt hear such news of those thou lovest best, and shalt win such sorrow from them, that it shall not fail thee till thy dying day!"

From Wales Henry struck across England, "turning neither to right nor left, and marching at a double pace." In a few days he was at Portsmouth. To hinder further mischief the younger Henry was ordered to join him and carried over sea; and the first news that reached Louis was the king's arrival in Normandy. "The King of England," Louis cried in his amazement, "is now in Ireland, now in England, now in Normandy; he may rather be said to fly than go by horse or boat!" Henry hastened on his landing to meet the legates. Negotiations were opened in May. Submission was inevitable, for fear of the rebellion which was then actually brewing left him in fact no choice of action. He agreed unreservedly to their demands. As an earnest of repentance and reformation he consented to a new coronation of his son; and on the 27th of August the young king was crowned again, along with his wife, at Winchester. Henry completed his submission at Avranches on the 27th of September. He swore that he had not desired the death of Thomas, but to make satisfaction for the anger he had shown, he promised to take the cross, to give funds to the Knights Templars for the defence of Jerusalem, and to found three religious houses. He renounced the Constitutions of Clarendon. He swore allegiance to Alexander against the anti-Pope. He promised that the possessions of Canterbury should be given back as they were a year before the flight of Thomas, and that his exiled friends should be restored to their possessions. No king of England had ever suffered so deep a humiliation. It seemed as thought he martyr were at last victorious. A year after the murder, in December 1172, Canterbury cathedral was once more solemnly opened, amid the cries of a vast multitude of people, "Avenge, O Lord, the blood which has been poured out!" On the anniversary of the Christmas Day when Thomas had launched his last excommunications, the excited people noted "a great thunder sudden and horrible in Ireland, in England, and in all the kingdoms of the French." Very soon mighty miracles were wrought by the name of the martyr throughout the whole of Europe. The metal phials which hung from the necks of pilgrims to the shrine of Canterbury became as famous as the shell and palm branch which marked the pilgrims to Compostella and Jerusalem. Before ten years were passed the King of France, the Count of Nevers, the Count of Boulogne, the Viscount of Aosta, the Archbishop of Reims, had knelt at his shrine among English prelates, nobles, knights, and beggars. The feast of the Trinity which Thomas had appointed to be observed on the anniversary of his consecration spread through the whole of Christendom. Henry, in fact, had to bear the full storm of scorn and hatred that falls on every statesman who stands in advance of the public opinion of his day. But his seeming surrender at Avranches won for the politic king immediate and decisive advantages. All fear of excommunication and interdict had passed away. The clergy were no longer alienated from him. The ecclesiastical difficulties raised by the coronation, and the jealousies of Louis, were set at rest. The alliance of the Pope was secured. The conquest of Ireland was formally approved. Success seemed to crown Henry's scheme for the building up of his empire. Britanny had been secured for Geoffrey in 1171; in June 1172 Richard was enthroned as Duke of Aquitaine; in the following August Henry was crowned for the second time King of England. Only the youngest child, scarcely five years old, was still "John Lackland," and in this same year Henry provided a dominion for John by a treaty of marriage between him and the heiress of the Count of Maurienne. Her inheritance stretched from the Lake of Geneva almost to the Gulf of Genoa; and the marriage would carry the Angevin dominions almost from the Atlantic to the Alps, and give into Henry's control every pass into Italy from the Great St. Bernard to the Col di Tenda, and all the highways by which travellers from Geneva and German lands beyond it, from Burgundy or from Gaul, made their way to Rome. To celebrate such a treaty Henry forgot his thrift. The two kings of England travelled with ostentatious splendour to meet the Count of Maurienne in Auvergne in January 1173. The King of Aragon and the Count of Toulouse met them at Montferrand, and a peace which Henry concluded between Toulouse and Aragon declared the height of his influence. Raymond bent at last to do homage for Toulouse, an act of submission which brought the dominion of Anjou to the very border of the Mediterranean.

There was a wild outbreak of alarm among all Henry's enemies as from his late humiliation he suddenly rose to this new height of power. The young king listened eagerly to those who plotted mischief, and one night in mid-Lent he fled to the court of Louis. In an agony of apprehension Henry sought to close the breach, and sent messages of conciliation to the French king. "Who sends this message to me?" demanded Louis. "The King of England," answered the messengers. "It is false," he said; "behold the King of England is here, and he sends no message to me by you; but if you so call his father who once was king, know ye that he asking is dead." The Counts of Flanders, of Boulogne, and of Blois, joined the young king in Paris, and did homage to him for fiefs which he bestowed on them—Kent, Dover, Eochester, lands in Lincolnshire, and domains and castles in Normandy—while he won the aid of the Scot king by granting him all Northumberland to the Tyne. The rebellion was organized in a month. Eleanor sent Richard, commander of the forces of Aquitaine, and Geoffrey, lord of Britanny, to take their share in the revolt; she herself was hastening after them when she was seized and thrown into prison. In Aquitaine, where the people impartially hated both French and Normans, the enthusiasm for independence was stirred by songs such as those of the troubadour, Bertrand de Born, lord of a fortress and a thousand men, who "was never content, save when the kings of the North were at war." In Normandy old hatreds had deepened year by year as Henry had gone on steadily seizing castles and lands which had fallen out of the possession of the crown. In 1171 he had doubled the revenue of the duchy by lands which the nobles had usurped. In 1172 he had alarmed them by having a new return made of the feudal tenures for purposes of taxation. The great lords of the duchy with one consent declared against him. Britanny sprang to arms. If Maine and Anjou remained fairly quiet, there was in both of them a powerful party of nobles who joined the revolt. The rebel party was everywhere increased by all who had joined the young king, "not because they thought his the juster cause," but in fierce defiance of a rule intolerable for its justice and its severity. England was no less ready for rebellion. The popular imagination was still moved by the horror of the archbishop's murder. The generation that remembered the miseries of the former anarchy was now passing away, and to some of the feudal lords order doubtless seemed the greater ill. The new king too had lavished promises and threats to win the English nobles to his side. "There were few barons in England who were not wavering in their allegiance to the king, and ready to desert him at any time." The more reckless eagerly joined the rebellion; the more prudent took refuge in France, that they might watch how events would go; there was a timid and unstable party who held outwardly to the king in vigilant uncertainty, haunted by fears that they should be swept away by the possible victory of his son. Such descendants of the Normans of the Conquest as had survived the rebellions and confiscations of a hundred years were eager for revenge. The Earl of Leicester and his wife were heirs of three great families, whose power had been overthrown by the policy of the Conqueror and his sons. William of Aumale was descended from the Count who had claimed the throne in the Conqueror's days, and bitterly remembered the time before Henry's accession, when he had reigned almost as king in Northern England. Hugh of Puiset, Bishop of Durham, whose diocese stretched across Northumberland, and who ruled as Earl Palatine of the marchland between England and Scotland; the Earl of Huntingdon, brother of the Scot king; Roger Mowbray, lord of the castles of Thirsk and Malessart north of York, and of a strong castle in the Isle of Axholm; Earl Ferrers, master of fortresses in Derby and Stafford; Hugh, Earl of Chester and Lord of Bayeux and Avranches, joined the rebellion. So did the old Hugh Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, who had already fought and schemed against Henry in vain twenty years before. The Earls of Clare and Gloucester on the Welsh border were of very doubtful loyalty. Half of England was in revolt, and north of a line drawn from Huntingdon to Chester the king only held a few castles—York, Richmond, Carlisle, Newcastle, and some fortresses of Northumberland. The land beyond Sherwood and the Trent, shut off by an almost continuous barrier of marsh and forest from the south, was still far behind the rest of England in civilization. The new industrial activity of Yorkshire was not yet forty years old; in a great part of the North money-rents had scarcely crept in, and the serfs were still toiling on under the burden of labour-dues which had been found intolerable elsewhere. The fines, the taxes, the attempt to bring its people under a more advanced system of government must have pressed very hardly on this great district which was not yet ready for it; and to the fierce anger of the barons, and the ready hostility of the monasteries, was perhaps added the exasperation of freeholder and serf.

Henry, however, was absolute master of the whole central administration of the realm. Moreover, by his decree of the year before he had set over every shire a sheriff who was wholly under his own control, trained in his court, pledged to his obedience, and who had firm hold of the courts, the local forces, and the finances. The king now hastened to appoint bishops whom he could trust to the vacant sees. Geoffrey, an illegitimate son who had been born to him very early, probably about the time when he visited England to receive knighthood, was sent to Lincoln; and friends of the king were consecrated to Winchester, Ely, Bath, Hereford, and Chichester. Prior Richard of Dover, a man "laudably inoffensive who prudently kept within his own sphere," was made Archbishop of Canterbury. Richard de Lucy remained in charge of the whole kingdom as justiciar. The towns and trading classes were steadfast in loyalty, and the baronage was again driven, as it had been before, to depend on foreign mercenaries.

War first broke out in France in the early summer of 1173. Normandy and Anjou were badly defended, and their nobles were already half in revolt, while the forces of France, Flanders, Boulogne, Chartres, Champagne, Poitou, and Britanny were allied against Henry. The counts of Flanders and Boulogne invaded Normandy from the north-east, and the traitor Count of Aumale, the guardian of the Norman border, gave into their hands his castles and lands. Louis and Henry's sons besieged Verneuil in the south-west. To westward the Earl of Chester and Ralph of Fougeres organized a rising in Britanny. In "extreme perplexity," utterly unable to meet his enemies in the field, Henry could only fortify his frontier, and hastily recall the garrison which he had left in Ireland, while he poured out his treasure in gathering an army of hired soldiers. Meanwhile he himself waited at Rouen, "that he might be seen by all the people, bearing with an even mind whatever happened, hunting oftener than usual, showing himself with a cheerful face to all who came, answering patiently those who wished to gain anything from him; while those whom he had nourished from days of childhood, those whom he had knighted, those who had been his servants and his most familiar counsellors, night by night stole away from him, expecting his speedy destruction and thinking the dominion of his son at once about to be established." Never did the kings show such resource and courage as in the campaign that followed. The Count of Boulogne was killed in battle, and the invading army in the north-east hesitated at the unlucky omen and fell back. Instantly Henry seized his opportunity. He rode at full speed to Verneuil with his army, a hastily collected mob of chance soldiers so dissatisfied and divided in allegiance that he dared not risk a battle. An audacious boast saved the crafty king. "With a fierce countenance and terrible voice" he cried to the French messengers who had hurried out to see if the astounding news of his arrival were true, "Go tell your king I am at hand as you see!" At the news of the ferocity and resolution of the enemy, Louis, "knowing him to be fierce and of a most bitter temper, as a bear robbed of its whelps rages in the forest," hastily retreated, and Henry, as wise a general as he was excellent an actor, fell back to Rouen. Meanwhile he sent to Britanny a force of Brabantines, whom alone he could trust. They surrounded the rebels at Dol; and before Henry, "forgetting food and sleep" and riding "as though he had flown," could reach the place, most of his foes were slain. The castle where the rest had taken refuge surrendered, and he counted among his prisoners the Earl of Chester, Ralph of Fougeres, and a hundred other nobles. The battle of Dol practically decided the war. It seemed vain to fight against Henry's good luck. A few Flemings once crossed the Norman border, and were defeated and drowned in retreat by the bridge breaking. "The very elements fight for the Normans!" cried the baffled and disheartened Louis. "When I entered Normandy my army perished for want of water, now this one is destroyed by too much water." In despair he sought to save himself by playing the part of mediator; and in September Henry met his sons at Gisors to discuss terms of peace. His terms were refused and the meeting broke up; but Henry remained practically master of the situation.

Meanwhile in England the rebellion had broken out in July. The Scottish army ravaged the north; the Earl of Leicester, with an army of Flemings which he had collected by the help of Louis and the younger Henry, landed on the coast of Suffolk, where Hugh Bigod was ready to welcome him. De Lucy and Bohun hurried from the north to meet this formidable danger, and with the help of the Earls of Cornwall, Arundel, and Gloucester, they defeated Leicester in a great battle at Fornham on the 17th of October. The earl himself was taken prisoner, and 10,000 of his foreign troops were slain. He and his wife were sent by Henry's orders to Normandy, and there thrown into prison. A truce was made with Scotland till the end of March. The king of France and the younger Henry abandoned hope, "for they saw that God was with the king;" and there was a general pause in the war.

With the spring of 1174, however, the strife raged again on all sides. Ireland rose in rebellion. William of Scotland marched into England supported by a Flemish force. Roger Mowbray, and probably the Bishop of Durham, were in league with him. Earl Ferrers fortified his castles in Derby and Stafford; Leicester Castle was still held by the Earl of Leicester's knights; Huntingdon by the Scot king's brother; and the Earl of Norfolk was joined in June by a picked body of Flemings. The king's castles at Norwich, Northampton, and Nottingham, were taken by the rebels, and a formidable line of enemies stretched right across mid-England. At the same time France and Flanders threatened invasion with a strong fleet, and "so great an army as had not been seen for many years." Count Philip, who had set his heart on the promised Kent, and on winning entrance into the lands of the Cistercian wool-growers of Lincolnshire, swore before Louis and his nobles that within fifteen days he would attack England; the younger Henry joined him at Gravelines in June, and they only waited for a fair wind to cross the Channel.

The justiciars were in an extremity of despair. "Seeing the evil that was done in the land," they anxiously sent messenger after messenger to the king. But Henry had little time to heed English complaints. Richard had declared war in Aquitaine; Maine and Anjou were half in revolt; Louis was on the point of invading Normandy. As a last resource his hard-pressed ministers sent Richard of Ilchester, the bishop-elect of Winchester, whom they knew to be favoured by the king beyond all others, to tell him again of "the hatred of the barons, the infidelity of the citizens, the clamour of the crowd always growing worse, the greed of the 'new men,' the difficulty of holding down the insurrection." "The English have sent their messengers before, and here comes even this man!" laughed the Normans; "what will be left in England to send after the king save the Tower of London!" Richard reached Henry on the 24th of June, and on the same day Henry abandoned Normandy to Louis' attack, and made ready for return. "He saw that while he was absent, and as it were not in existence, no one in England would offer any opposition to him who was expected to be his successor;" and he "preferred that his lands beyond the sea should be in peril rather than his own realm of England." Sending forward a body of Brabantines, he followed with his train of prisoners—Queen Eleanor, Queen Margaret and her sister Adela, the Earls of Chester and of Leicester, and various governors of castles whom he carried with him in chains. In an agony of anxiety the king watched for a fair wind till the 7th of July. At last the sails were spread; but of a sudden the waves began to rise, and the storm to grow ominously. Those who watched the face of the king saw him to be in doubt; then he lifted his eyes to heaven and prayed before them all, "If I have set before my eyes the things which make for the peace of clergy and people, if the King of heaven has ordained that peace shall be restored by my arrival, then let Him in His mercy bring me to a safe port; but if He is against me, and has decreed to visit my kingdom with a rod, then let me never touch the shores of the land."

A good omen was granted, and he safely reached Southampton. Refusing even to enter the city, and eating but bread and water, he pressed forward to Canterbury. At its gates he dismounted and put away from him the royal majesty, and with bare feet, in the garb of a pilgrim and penitent, his footsteps marked with blood, he passed on to the church. There he sought the martyr's sepulchre, and lying prostrate with outstretched hands, he remained long in prayer, with abundance of tears and bitter groanings. After a sermon by Foliot the king filled up the measure of humiliation. He made public oath that he was guiltless of the death of the archbishop, but in penitence of his hasty words he prayed absolution of the bishops, and gave his body to the discipline of rods, receiving three or five strokes from each one of the seventy monks. That night he prayed and fasted before the shrine, and the next day rode still fasting to London, which he reached on the 14th. Three days later a messenger rode at midnight to the gate of the palace where the king lay ill, worn out by suffering and fatigue for which the doctors had applied their usual remedy of bleeding. He forced his way to the door of the king's bedchamber. "Who art thou?" cried the king, suddenly startled from sleep. "I am the servant of Ranulf de Glanville, and I come to bring good tidings."—"Ranulf our friend, is he well?"—"He is well, my lord, and behold he holds your enemy, the King of Scots, captive in chains at Richmond." The king was half stunned by the news, but as the messenger produced Glanville's letter, he sprang from his bed, and in a transport of emotion and tears, gave thanks to God, while the joyful ringing of bells told the good news to the London citizens.

Two great dangers, in fact, had passed away while the king knelt before the shrine at Canterbury. On that very day the Scottish army had been broken to pieces. In the south the fleet which lay off the coast of Flanders had dispersed. On the 18th of July, the day after the good news had come, Henry himself marched north with the army that had been gathered while he lay ill. Before a week was over Hugh Bigod had yielded up his castles and banished his Flemish soldiers. The Bishop of Durham secretly sent away his nephew, the Count of Bar, who had landed with foreign troops. Henry's Welsh allies attacked Tutbury, a castle of the Earl of Ferrers. Geoffrey, the bishop-elect of Lincoln, had before Henry's landing waged vigorous war on Mowbray. By the end of July the whole resistance was at an end. On the last day of the month the king held a council at Northampton, at which William of Scotland stood before him a prisoner, while Hugh of Durham, Mowbray, Ferrers, and the officers of the Earl of Leicester came to give up their fortresses. The castles of Huntingdon and Norfolk were already secured. The suspected Earls of Gloucester and of Clare swore fidelity at the King's Court. Scotland was helpless. A treaty was made with the Irish kings. Wales was secured by a marriage between the prince of North Wales and Henry's sister.

But there was still danger over sea, where the armies of the French and the Flemings had closed round Rouen. On the 8th of August, exactly a month after his landing at Southampton, Henry again crossed the Channel with his unwieldy train of prisoners. As he stood under the walls of Rouen, the besieging armies fled by night. Louis' fancy already showed him the English host in the heart of France, and in his terror he sought for peace. The two kings concluded a treaty at Gisors, and on the 30th of September the conspiracy against Henry was finally dissolved. His sons did homage to him, and bound themselves in strange medieval fashion by the feudal tie which was the supreme obligation of that day; he was now "not only their father, but their liege lord." The Count of Flanders gave up into Henry's hands the charter given him by the young king. The King of Scotland made absolute submission in December 1174, and was sent back to his own land. Eleanor alone remained a close prisoner for years to come.

The revolt of 1173-74 was the final ruin of the old party of the Norman baronage. The Earl of Chester got back his lands, but lost his castles, and was sent out of the way to the Irish war; he died before the king in 1181. Leicester humbly admitted "that he and all his holdings were at the mercy of the king," and Henry "restored to him Leicester, and the forest which by common oath of the country had been sworn to belong to the king's own domain, for he knew that this had been done for envy, and also because it was known that the king hated the earl;" but Henry had a long memory, and the walls of Leicester were in course of time thrown down and its fortifications levelled. The Bishop of Durham had to pay 200 marks of silver for the king's pardon, and give up Durham Castle. At the death of Hugh Bigod in 1177 Henry seized the earl's treasure. The Earls of Clare and Gloucester died within two years, and the king's son John was made Gloucester's heir. The rebel Count of Aumale died in 1179, and his heiress married the faithful Earl of Essex, who took the title of Aumale with all the lands on both sides of the water. In 1186 Roger Mowbray went on crusade. The king took into his own hands all castles, even those of "his most familiar friend," the justiciar De Lucy. The work of dismantling dangerous fortresses which he had begun twenty years before was at last completed, and no armed revolt of the feudal baronage was ever again possible in England.

But the rebellion had wakened in the king's mind a deep alarm, which showed itself in a new severity of temper. Famine and plague had fallen on the country; the treasury was well nigh empty; law and order were endangered. Henry hastened to return as soon as his foreign campaign was over, and in May 1175 "the two kings of England, whom a year before the breadth of the kingdom could not contain, now crossed in one ship, sat at one table, and slept in one bed." In token of reconciliation with the Church they attended a synod at Westminster, and went together on solemn pilgrimage to the martyr's tomb. Then they made a complete visitation of the whole kingdom. Starting from Reading on the 1st of June, they went by Oxford to Gloucester, then along the Welsh border to Shrewsbury, through the midland counties by Lichfield and Nottingham to York, and then back to London, having spent on their journey two months and a few days; and in autumn they made a progress through the south-western provinces. At every halt some weighty business was taken in hand. The Church was made to feel anew the royal power. Twelve of the great abbeys were now without heads, and the king, justly fearing lest the monks should elect abbots from their own body, "and thus the royal authority should be shaken, and they should follow another guidance than his own," sent orders that on a certain day chosen men should be sent to elect acceptable prelates at his court and in his presence. The safety of the Welsh marches was assured. The castle of Bristol was given up to the king, and border barons and Welsh princes swore fidelity at Gloucester. An edict given at Woodstock ordered that no man who during the war had been in arms against the king should come to his court without a special order; that no man should remain in his court after the setting of the sun, or should come to it before the sun rising; in the England that lay west of the Severn, none might carry bow and arrow or pointed knife. In this wild border district the checks which prevailed elsewhere against violent crime were unknown. The outlaw or stranger who fled to forest or moorland for hiding, might lawfully be slain by any man who met him. No "murder-fine" was known there. The king, not daring perhaps to interfere with the "liberties" of the west, may have sought to check crime by this order against arms; but such a law was practically a dead letter, for in a land where every man was the guardian of his own life it was far more perilous to obey the new edict than to disregard it.

The king's harsh mood was marked too by the cruel prosecutions of offences against forest law which had been committed in the time of the war. The severe punishments were perhaps a means of chastizing is affected landowners; they were certainly useful in filling the empty treasury. Nobles and barons everywhere were sued for hunting or cutting wood or owning dogs, and were fined sometimes more than their whole possessions were worth. In vain the justiciar, De Lucy, pleaded for justice to men who had done these things by express orders of the king given to De Lucy himself; "his testimony could prevail nothing against the royal will." Even the clergy were dragged before the civil courts, "neither archbishop nor bishop daring to make any protest." The king's triumph over the rebellion was visibly complete when at York the treaty which had been made the previous year with the King of Scotland was finally concluded, and William and his brother did homage to the English sovereigns. A few weeks later Henry and his son received at Windsor the envoys of the King of Connaught, the only one of the Irish princes who had till now refused homage.

In the Church as in the State the royal power was unquestioned. A papal legate arrived in October, who proved a tractable servant of the king; "with the right hand and the left he took gifts, which he planted together in his coffers". His coming gave Henry opportunity to carry out at last through common action of Church and State his old scheme of reforms. In the Assize of Northampton, held in January 1176, the king confirmed and perfected the judicial legislation which he had begun ten years before in the Assize of Clarendon. The kingdom was divided into six circuits. The judges appointed to the circuits were given a more full independence than they had before, and were no longer joined with the sheriffs of the counties in their sessions, their powers were extended beyond criminal jurisdiction to questions of property, of inheritance, of wardship, of forfeiture of crown lands, of advowsons to churches, and of the tenure of land. For the first time the name of Justitiarii Itinerantes was given in the Pipe Roll to these travelling justices, and the anxiety of the king to make the procedure of his courts perfectly regular, instead of depending on oral tradition, was shown by the law books which his ministers began at this time to draw up. As a security against rebellion, a new oath of fealty was required from every man, whether earl or villein, fugitives and outlaws were to be more sharply sought after, and felons punished with harsher cruelty. "Thinking more of the king than of his sheep," the legate admitted Henry's right to bring the clergy before secular courts for crimes against forest law, and in various questions of lay fiefs; and agreed that murderers of clerks, who till then had been dealt with by the ecclesiastical courts, should bear the same punishment as murderers of laymen, and should be disinherited. Religious churchmen looked on with helpless irritation at Henry's first formal victory over the principles of Thomas; in the view of his own day he had "renewed the Assize of Clarendon, and ordered to be observed the execrable decrees for which the blessed martyr Thomas had borne exile for seven years, and been crowned with the crown of martyrdom."

During the next two years Henry was in perpetual movement through the land from Devon to Lincoln, and between March 1176 and August 1177 he summoned eighteen great councils, besides many others of less consequence. From 1178 to 1180 he paid his last long visit to England, and again with the old laborious zeal he began his round of journeys through the country. "The king inquired about the justices whom he had appointed, how they treated the men of the kingdom; and when he learned that the land and the subjects were too much burthened with the great number of justices, because there were eighteen, he elected five—two clerks and three laymen—all of his own household; and he ordered that they should hear all appeals of the kingdom and should do justice, and that they should not depart from the King's Court, but should remain there to hear appeals, so that if any question should come to them they should present it to the audience of the king, and that it should be decided by him and by the wise men of the kingdom." The Justices of the Bench, as they were called, took precedence of all other judges. The influence of their work was soon felt. From this time written records began to be kept of the legal compromises made before the King's Court to render possible the transference of land. It seems that in 1181 the practice was for the first time adopted of entering on rolls all the business which came to the King's Court, the pleas of the Crown and common pleas between subjects. Unlike in form to the great Roll of the Pipe, in which the records of the Exchequer Court had long been kept, the Plea Rolls consisted of strips of parchment filed together by their tops, on which, in an uncertain and at first a blundering fashion, the clerks noted down their records of judicial proceedings. But practice soon brought about an orderly and mechanical method of work, and the system of procedure in the Bench rapidly attained a scientific perfection. Before long the name of the Curia Regis was exclusively applied to the new court of appeal.

The work of legal reform had now practically come to an end. Henry indeed still kept a jealous watch over his judges. Once more, on the retirement of De Lucy in 1179, he divided the kingdom into new circuits, and chose three bishops—Winchester, Ely, and Norwich—"as chief justiciars, hoping that if he had failed before, the seat least he might find steadfast in righteousness, turning neither to the right nor to the left, not oppressing the poor, and not deciding the cause of the rich for bribes." In the next year he set Glanville finally at the head of the legal administration. After that he himself was called to other cares. But he had really finished his task in England. The mere system of routine which the wisdom of Henry I. had set to control the arbitrary power of the king had given place to a large and noble conception of government; and by the genius of Henry II. the law of the land was finally established as the supreme guardian of the old English liberties and the new administrative order.



CHAPTER X

THE COURT OF HENRY

In the years that followed the Assize of Northampton Henry was at the height of his power. He was only forty-three, and already his triumph was complete. One of his sons was King of England, one Count of Poitou, one Lord of Britanny, one was named King of Ireland. His eldest daughter, wife of the Duke of Saxony, was mother of a future emperor, the second was Queen of Castile, the third was in 1176 married to William of Sicily, the wealthiest king of his time. All nations hastened to do honour to so great a potentate. Henry's counselors were called together to receive, now ambassadors from Sicily, now the envoys of the Emperors both of the East and of the West, of the Kings of Castile and Navarre, and of the Duke of Saxony, the Archbishop of Reims, and the Count of Flanders.

In England the king's power knew no limits. Rebellion had been finally crushed. His wife and sons were held in check. He had practically won a victory over the Church. Even in renouncing the Constitutions of Clarendon at Avranches Henry abandoned more in word than in deed. He could still fall back on the law of the land and the authority which he had inherited from the Norman kings. Since the Conqueror's days no Pope might be recognized as Apostolic Pope save at the king's command; no legate might land or use any power in England without the king's consent; no ecclesiastical senate could decree laws which were not authorized by the king, or could judge his servants against his will. The king could effectually resist the introduction of foreign canon law; he could control communications with Rome; he could stay the proceedings of ecclesiastical courts if they went too far, or prejudiced the rights of his subjects; and no sentence could be enforced save by his will. Henry was strong enough only six years after the death of Thomas to win control over a vast amount of important property by insisting that questions of advowson should be tried in the secular courts, and that the murderers of clerks should be punished by the common law. He was able in effect to prevent the Church courts from interfering in secular matters save in the case of marriages and of wills. He preserved an unlimited control over the choice of bishops. In an election to the see of St. David's the canons had neglected to give the king notice before the nomination of the bishop. He at once ordered them to be deprived of their lands and revenues. "As they have deprived me," he said, "of all share in the election, they shall have neither part nor lot in this promotion." The monks, stricken with well-founded terror, followed the king from place to place to implore his mercy and to save their livings; with abject repentance they declared they would accept whomsoever the king liked, wherever and whenever he chose. Finally Henry sent them a monk unknown to the chapter, who had been elected in his chamber, at his bedside, in the presence of his paid servants, and according to his orders, "after the fashion of an English tyrant," and who had then and there raised his tremulous and fearful song of thanksgiving. Towards the close of his reign there was again a dispute as to the election of an Archbishop of Canterbury. The monks, under Prior Alban, were determined that the election should lie with them. The king was resolved to secure the due influence of the bishops, on whom he could depend. "The Prior wanted to be a second Pope in England," he complained to the Count of Flanders, to which his affable visitor replied that he would see all the churches of his land burned before he would submit to such a thing. For three months the strife raged between the convent and the bishops in spite of the king's earnest efforts at reconciliation. "Peace is by all means to be sought," he urged. "He was a wise man who said, 'Let peace be in our days'. For the sake of God choose peace, as much as in you lies follow after peace" "The voice of the people is the voice of God," he argued in proposing at last that bishops and monks should sit together for the election. "But this he said," observed the monks, "knowing the mind of the bishops, and that they sought rather the favour of the king than of God, as their fathers and predecessors had done, who denied St. Anselm for Rufus, who forsook Theobald for King Stephen, who rejected the holy martyr Thomas for King Henry." Henry, however, won the day, and his friend and nominee, the good Bishop Baldwin of Worcester, singular for piety and righteousness, was set in the Primate's chair. Of this archbishop we read that "his power was so great and so formidable that no one was equal to him in all England, and without his pleasure no one would dare even to obey the commands of the Pope.... But," adds the irritated chronicler, "I think that he would do nothing save at the orders of the king, even if the Apostle Peter came to England about it."

In the opinion of anxious critics of the day, indeed, the victory which had been almost won by Thomas seemed altogether lost after his death. Even the monasteries, where the ecclesiastical temper was most formidable, were forced to choose abbots and priors whom the king could trust. In its subjection the Church was in Henry's eyes an admirable engine to serve the uses of the governing power. One of the most important steps in the conquest of Wales had been the forcing of the Welsh Church into obedience to the see of Canterbury; and Henry steadily used the Welsh clergy as instruments of his policy. His efforts to draw the Scotch Church into a like obedience were unceasing. In Ireland he worked hard for the same object. On the death of an Archbishop of Dublin, the Irish clergy were summoned to Evesham, and there bidden in the king's court, after the English fashion, to choose an Englishman, Cumin, as their archbishop. The claims of the papacy were watched with the most jealous care. No legate dared to land in England save at the king's express will. A legate in Ireland who seemed to "play the Roman over them" was curtly told by the king's officers that he must do their bidding or leave the country. In 1184 the Pope sent to ask aid for his necessities in Rome. A council was called to consider the matter, and Glanville urged that if papal messengers were allowed to come through England collecting money, it might afterwards become a custom to the injury of the kingdom. The Council decided that the only tolerable solution of the difficulty was for the king to send whatever he liked to the Pope as a gift from himself, and to accept afterwards from them compensation for what he might have given.

The questions raised by the king between Church and State in England had everywhere to be faced sooner or later. Even so devoted a servant of the Church as St. Louis of France was forced into measures of reform as far-reaching as those which Henry had planned a century earlier. But Henry had begun his work a hundred years too soon; he stood far before his age in his attempt to bring the clergy under a law which was not their own. His violence had further hindered the cause of reform, and the work which he had taken in hand was not to be fully carried out till three centuries and a half had passed away. We must remember that in raising the question of judicial reform he had no desire to quarrel with the Church or priesthood. He refused indeed to join in any fanatical outbreak of persecution of the Jews, such as Philip of France consented to; and when persecution raged against the Albigenses of the south he would have no part or lot in it, and kept his own dominions open as a refuge for the wandering outcasts; but this may well have been by the counsel of the wise churchmen about him. To the last he looked on the clergy as his best advisers and supporters. He never demanded tribute from churches or monasteries, a monkish historian tells us, as other princes were wont to do on plea of necessity; with religious care he preserved them from unjust burthens and public exactions. By frequent acts of devotion he sought to win the favour of Heaven or to rouse the religious sympathies of England on his behalf. In April 1177 he met at Canterbury his old enemy, the Archbishop of Reims, and laid on the shrine of St. Thomas a charter of privileges for the convent. On the 1st of May he visited the shrine of St. Eadmund, and the next day that of St. Aetheldreda at Ely. The bones of a saint stolen from Bodmin were restored by the king's order, and on their journey were brought to Winchester that he might do them reverence. Relics discovered by miraculous vision were buried with pomp at St. Albans. Since his vow four years before at Avranches to build three monasteries for the remission of his sins, he had founded in Normandy and England four or five religious houses for the Templars, the Carthusians, and the Austin canons; he now brought nuns from Fontevraud, for whom he had a special reverence, and set them in the convent at Amesbury, whose former inhabitants were turned out to make way for them; while the canons of Waltham were replaced by a stricter order of Austin canons. A templar was chosen to be his almoner, that he might carry to the king the complaints of the poor which could not come to his own ears, and distribute among the needy a tenth of all the food and drink that came into the house of the king.

It is true that on Henry himself the strife with the Church left deep traces. He became imperious, violent, suspicious. The darker sides of his character showed themselves, its defiance, its superstition, its cynical craft, its passionate pride, its ungoverned wrath. His passions broke out with a reckless disregard of earlier restraints. Eleanor was a prisoner and a traitor; she was nearly fifty when he himself was but forty-one. From this time she practically disappeared out of Henry's life. The king had bitter enemies at court, and they busied themselves in spreading abroad dark tales; more friendly critics could only plead that he was "not as bad as his grandfather." After the rebellion of 1174 he openly avowed his connection with Rosamond Clifford, which seems to have begun some time before. Eleanor was then in prison, and tales of the maze, the silken clue, the dagger, and the bowl, were the growth of later centuries. But "fair Rosamond" did not long hold her place at court. She died early and was carried to Godstowe nunnery, to which rich gifts were sent by her friends and by the king himself. A few years later Hugh of Lincoln found her shrine before the high altar decked with gold and silken hangings, and the saintly bishop had the last finery of Rosamond swept from the holy place, till nothing remained but a stone with the two words graven on it, "Tumba Rosamundae."

But behind Henry's darkest and sternest moods lay a nature quick in passionate emotion, singularly sensitive to affection, tender, full of generous impulse, clinging to those he loved with yearning fidelity and long patience. The story of St. Hugh shows the unlimited influence won over him by a character of singular holiness. Henry had brought Hugh from Burgundy, and set him over a newly-founded Cistercian priory at Witham. The little settlement was in sore straits, and the impatient monks railed passionately at the king, who had abandoned them in their necessities. It was just after the rebellion, and Henry, hard pressed by anxiety, was in his harshest and most bitter temper. "Have patience," said Hugh, "for the king is wise beyond measure and wholly inscrutable; it may be that he delays to grant our request that he may try us." But brother Girard was not to be soothed, and in a fresh appeal to the king his vehemence broke out in a torrent of reproaches and abuse. Henry listened unmoved till the monk ceased from sheer lack of words. There was dead silence for a time, while Prior Hugh bent down his head in distress, and the king watched him under his eyelids. At last, taking no more notice of the monk than if he never existed, Henry turned to Hugh, "What are you thinking of, good man?" he said. "Are you preparing to go away and leave our kingdom?" Hugh answered humbly and gently, "I do not despair of you so far, my lord; rather I have great sorrow for the troubles and labours which hinder the care for your soul. You are busy now, but some day, when the Lord helps, we will finish the good work begun." At this the king's self-control broke down; his tears burst forth as he fell on Hugh's neck, and cried with an oath, "By the salvation of my soul, while you have the breath of life you shall not depart from my kingdom! With you I wilt hold wise counsel, and with you I will take heed for my soul!" From that time there was none in the kingdom whom Henry loved and trusted as he did the Prior of Witham, and to the end of his life he constantly sought in all matters the advice of one who gave him scant flattery and much sharp reproof. The coarse-fibred, hard-worked man of affairs looked with superstitious reverence on one who lived so near to God that even in sleep his lips still moved in prayer. Such a man as Hugh could succeed where Thomas of Canterbury had failed. He excommunicated without notice to the king a chief forester who had interfered with the liberties of the Lincoln clergy, and bluntly refused to make amends by appointing a royal officer to a prebend in his cathedral, saying that "benefices were for clergy and not for courtiers." A general storm of abuse and calumny broke out against him at the palace. Henry angrily summoned him to his presence. The bishop was received by the king in an open space under the trees, where he sat with all the courtiers ranged in a close circle. Hugh drew near and saluted, but there was no answer. Upon this the bishop put his hand lightly on the noble who sat next to the king, and made place for himself by Henry's side. Still the silence was unbroken, the king speechless as a furious man choked with his anger. Looking up at last, he asked a servant for needle and thread, and began to sew up a torn bandage which was tied round a wounded finger. The lively Frenchman observed him patiently; at last he turned to the king, "How like you are now," he said, "to your cousins of Falaise!" The king's quick wit caught the extravagant impertinence, and in an ecstasy of delight he rolled on the ground with laughter, while a perplexed merriment ran round the circle of courtiers who scarce knew what the joke might be. At last the king found his voice. "Do you hear the insolence of this barbarian? I myself will explain." And he reminded them of his ancestress, the peasant girl Arlotta of Falaise, where the citizens were famous for their working in skins. "And now, good man," he said, turning to the bishop in a broad good-humour, "how is it that without consulting us you have laid our forester under anathema, and made of no account the poor little request we made, and sent not even a message of explanation or excuse?"—"Ah," said Hugh, "I knew in what a rage you and your courtiers were!" and he then proceeded boldly to declare what were his rights and duties as a bishop of the Church of God. Henry gave way on every point. The forester had to make open satisfaction and was publicly flogged, and from that time the bishop was no more tormented to set courtiers over the Church. There were many other theologians besides Hugh of Lincoln among the king's friends—Baldwin, afterwards archbishop; Foliot, one of the chief scholars of his time; Richard of Ilchester, as learned in theology as capable in administration; John of Oxford, lawyer and theologian; Peter of Blois, ready for all kinds of services that might be asked, and as skilled in theology as in rhetoric. Henry was never known to choose an unworthy friend; laymen could only grumble that he was accustomed to take advice of bishops and abbots rather than that of knights even about military matters. But theology was not the main preoccupation of the court. Henry, inquisitive in all things, learned in most, formed the centre of a group of distinguished men which, for varied intellectual activity, had no rival save at the university of Paris. There was not a court in Christendom in the affairs of which the king was not concerned, and a crowd of travellers was for ever coming and going. English chroniclers grew inquisitive about revolutions in Norway, the state of parties in Germany, the geography of Spain. They copied despatches and treaties. They asked endless questions of every traveller as to what was passing abroad, and noted down records which have since become authorities for the histories of foreign states. Political and historical questions were eagerly debated. Gerald of Wales and Glanville, as they rode together, would discuss why the Normans had so fallen away in valour that now even when helped by the English they were less able to resist the French than formerly when they stood alone. The philosophic Glanville might suggest that the French at that time had been weakened by previous wars, but Gerald, true to the feudal instincts of a baron of the Norman-Welsh border, spoke of the happy days before dukes had been made into kings, who oppressed the Norman nobles by their overbearing violence, and the English by their insular tyranny; "For there is nothing which so stirs the heart of man as the joy of liberty, and there is nothing which so weakens it as the oppression of slavery," said Gerald, who had himself felt the king's hand heavy on him.

One of the most striking features of the court was the group of great lawyers which surrounded the king. The official nobility trained at the Exchequer and Curia Regis, and bound together by the daily work of administering justice, formed a class which was quite unknown anywhere on the continent. It was not till a generation later that a few clerks learned in civil law were called to the king's court of justice in France, and the system was not developed till the time of Louis IX.; in Germany such a reform did not take place for centuries. But in England judges and lawyers were already busied in building up the scientific study of English law. Richard Fitz-Neal, son of Bishop Nigel of Ely and great-nephew of Roger of Salisbury, and himself Treasurer of the Exchequer and Bishop of London, began in 1178 the Dialogus de Scaccario, an elaborate account of the whole system of administration. Glanville, the king's justiciar, drew up probably the oldest version which we have of the Conqueror's laws and the English usages which still prevailed in the inferior jurisdictions. A few years later he wrote his Tractatus de Legibus Angliae, which was in fact a handbook for the Curia Regis, and described the new process in civil trials and the rules established by the Norman lawyers for the King's Court and its travelling judges. Thomas Brown, the king's almoner, besides his daily record of the king's doings, left behind him an account of the laws of the kingdom.

The court became too a great school of history. From the reign of Alfred to the end of the Wars of the Roses there is but one break in the contemporary records of our history, a break which came in the years that followed the outbreak of feudal lawlessness. In 1143 William of Malmesbury and Orderic ceased writing; in 1151 the historians who had carried on the task of Florence of Worcester also ceased; three years later the Saxon Chronicle itself came to an end, and in 1155 Henry of Huntingdon finished his work. From 1154 to 1170 we have, in fact, no contemporary chronicle. In the historical schools of the north compilers had laboured at Hexham, at Durham, and in the Yorkshire monasteries to draw together valuable chronicles founded on the work of Baeda; but in 1153 the historians of Hexham closed their work, and those of Durham in 1161. Only the monks of Melrose still carried on their chronicle as far as 1169. The great tradition, however, was once more worthily taken up by the men of Henry's court, kindled by the king's intellectual activity. A series of chronicles appeared in a few years, which are unparalleled in Europe at the time. At the head of the court historians stood the treasurer, Richard Fitz Neal, the author of the Dialogus, who in 1172 began a learned work in three columns, treating of the ecclesiastical, political, and miscellaneous history of England in his time—a work which some scholars say is included in the Gesta Henrici II that was once connected with the name of Benedict of Peterborough. The king's clerk and justiciar, Roger of Hoveden, must have been collecting materials for the famous Chronicle which he began very soon after Henry's death, when he gathered up and completed the work of the Durham historians. Gervase of Tilbury, marshal of the kingdom of Arles, well known in every great town of Italy and Sicily, afterwards the writer of Otia Imperialia for the Emperor Otto IV., wrote a book of anecdotes, now lost, for the younger King Henry. Gerald of Wales, a busy courtier, and later a chaplain of the king, was the brilliant historian of the Irish conquest and the mighty deeds of his cousins, the Fitz Geralds and Fitz Stephens. "In process of time when the work was completed, not willing to hide his candle under a bushel, but to place it on a candlestick that it might give light to all, he resolved to read it publicly at Oxford, where the most learned and famous English clergy were at that time to be found. And as there were three distinctions or divisions in the work, and as each division occupied a day, the reading lasted three successive days. On the first day he received and entertained at his lodgings all the poor of the town, on the next day all the doctors of the different faculties and such of their pupils as were of fame and note, on the third day the rest of the scholars with the milites, townsmen, and many burgesses. It was a costly and noble act; the authentic and ancient times of poesy were thus in some measure renewed, and neither present nor past time can furnish any record of such a solemnity having ever taken place in England."

Literature was shaking itself free from the limits imposed upon it while it lay wholly in the hands of churchmen, and Gerald's writings, the first books of vivacious and popular prose-writing in England, were avowedly composed for "laymen and uneducated princes," and professed to tell "the doings of the people." He declared his intention to use common and easily understood words as he told his tales of Ireland and Wales, of their physical features, their ways and customs, and with a literary instinct that knew no scruple, added scandal, gossip, satire, bits of folk-lore or of classical learning or of Bible phrases, which might serve the purposes of literary artifice or of frank conceit. The independent temper which had been stirred by the fight with the Church was illustrated in his Speculum Ecclesiae, a bitter satire on the monks and on the Roman Curia. A yet more terrible scorn of the crime and vice which disgraced the Church inspired the Apocalypse and the Confession of Bishop Goliath, the work of Walter Map, Archdeacon of Oxford, king's chaplain ever since the days when Becket was chancellor, justiciar, ambassador, poet, scholar, theologian, satirist. The greater part of the legends of the Saint Graal that sprang out of the work of Robert de Boron were probably woven together by his genius; and were used in the great strife to prove that the English Church originated independently of Rome. His Courtier's Triflings, suggested by John of Salisbury's Polycraticus, is the only book which actually bears his name, and with its gossip, its odd accumulations of learning, its fragments of ancient history, its outbursts of moral earnestness, its philosophy, brings back to us the very temper of the court and the stir and quickening of men's minds—a stir which found expression in other works of bitter satire, in the lampoon of Ralph Niger, and in the violent attacks on the monks by Nigellus.

Nor was the new intellectual activity confined to the court. The whole country shared in the movement. Good classical learning might be had in England, if for the new-fashioned studies of canon law and theology men had to go abroad; but conservative scholars grumbled that now law and physics had become such money-making sciences that they were beginning to cut short the time which used to be given to classical studies. Gerald of Wales mourned over the bringing in from Spain of "certain treatises, lately found and translated, pretended to have been written by Aristotle," which tended to foster heresy. The cathedral schools, such as York, Lincoln, or London, played the part of the universities in our own day. The household of the Archbishop of Canterbury had been the earliest and the most distinguished centre of learning. Of all the remarkable men of the day there was none to compare with John of Salisbury, the friend of Theobald and of Becket, and his book, the Polycraticus (1156-59), was perhaps the most important work of the time. It begins by recounting the follies of the court, passes on to the discussion of politics and philosophy, deals with the ethical systems of the ancients, and hints at a new system of his own, and is everywhere enriched by wide reading and learning acquired at the schools of Chartres and Paris London could boast of the historian Ralph of Diceto, always ready with a quotation from the classics amid the court news and politics of his day. Monasteries rivaled one another in their collection of books and in drawing up of chronicles. If their brethren were more famed for piety than for literary arts, they would borrow some noted man of learning, or even a practised scribe, who would for the occasion write under a famous name. The friends and followers of Becket told on every side and in every way, in prose or poetry, in Latin or Norman-French, the story of their master's martyrdom and miracles. The greatest historian of his day, William of Newburgh, was monk in a quiet little Yorkshire monastery. Gervase, a monk of Canterbury, began the Chronicle that bears his name in 1185. The historical workers of Durham, of Hexham, and of Melrose started into a new activity. A canon of the priory of St. Bartholomew's in London wrote before Henry's death a life of its founder Rahere, and noted the first cases received into the hospital. Joseph of Exeter, brother of Archbishop Baldwin, was the brilliant author of a Latin poem on the Troy Story, and of a poetic history of the first crusade. There was scarcely a religious house in the whole land which could not boast of some distinction in learning or literature.

Even the feudal nobles caught the prevailing temper. A baron was not content to have only his household dwarf or jester, he must have his household poet too. Intellectual interest and curiosity began to spread beyond the class of clerks to whom Latin, the language of learning and worship, was familiar, and a demand began to spring up for a popular literature which could be understood of the unlearned baron or burgher. Virgil and Statius and Ovid were translated into French. Wace in 1155 dedicated to Eleanor his translation into Norman-French of the History of Geoffrey of Monmouth, a book which came afterwards to be called the Brut d'Engleterre, and was one of the sources of the first important English poem, Layamon's Brut. Later on, in honour of Henry, Wace told in the Roman de Rou the story of his Norman ancestors, and the poem, especially in the account of Senlac, has given some brilliant details to history. Other Norman-French poems were written in England on the rebellion, on the conquest of Ireland, on the life of the martyred Thomas—poems which threw off the formal rules of the stilted Latin fashion, and embodied the tales of eye-witnesses with their graphic brief descriptions. An Anglo-Norman literature of song and sermon fast grew up, absolutely identical in tongue with the Norman literature beyond the Channel, but marked by special characteristics of thought and feeling. Meanwhile English, as the speech of the common folk, still lived on as a tongue apart, a tongue so foreign to judges and barons and Courtiers that authors or transcribers could not copy half a dozen English lines without a mistake. The serfs and traders who spoke it were too far removed from the upper court circle to take into their speech foreign words or foreign grammatical forms; the songs which their minstrels sang from fair to fair only lived on the lips of the poor, and left no echo behind them.



CHAPTER XI

THE DEATH OF HENRY

In the last nine years of Henry's reign his work lay elsewhere than in his English kingdom. They were years spent in a passionate effort to hold together the unwieldy empire he had so laboriously built up. On the death of Louis in 1180 the peaceful and timid traditions of his reign were cast aside by the warlike Philip, who had from childhood cherished a violent hatred against Henry, and who was bent on the destruction of rival powers, and the triumph of the monarchy in France. Henry's absorbing care, on the other hand, was to prevent war; and during the next four years he constantly forced reconciliation on the warring princes of France. "All who loved peace rejoiced at his coming," the chroniclers constantly repeat. "He had faith in the Lord, that if he crossed over he could make peace." "As though always at his coming peace should certainly be made."

But in Britanny and in Aquitaine there was no peace. The sons whom he had set over his provinces had already revolted in 1173. In 1177 fresh troubles broke out, and from that time their history was one of unbroken revolt against their father and strife amongst themselves. "Dost thou not know," Geoffrey once answered a messenger of his father's, sent to urge him to peace, "that it is our proper nature, planted in us by inheritance from our ancestors, that none of us should love the other, but that ever brother should strive against brother, and son against father. I would not that thou shouldst deprive us of our hereditary right, nor vainly seek to rob us of our nature!" In 1182 Henry sought once more to define the authority of his sons, and to assert the unity of the Empire under his own supremacy by ordering Richard and Geoffrey to do homage to their brother for Aquitaine and Britanny. Richard's passionate refusal struck the first open blow at his father's imperial schemes, and war at once broke out. The nobles of Aquitaine, weary of the severe rule of Richard, had long plotted to set in his place his gentler brother Henry, and the young king, along with Geoffrey, lent himself openly to the conspiracy. In 1183 they called for help from Flanders, France, and Normandy, and a general revolt seemed on the point of breaking out, like that of ten years before. Henry II. was forced to march himself into Aquitaine. But in a war with his sons he was no longer the same man as when he fought with French king or rebel barons. His political sagacity and his passionate love of his children fought an unequal battle. Duped by every show of affection, he was at their mercy in intrigue. Twice peaceful embassies, which he sent to Henry and Geoffrey, were slain before their eyes without protest. As he himself talked with them they coolly saw one of their archers shoot at him and wound his horse. The younger Henry pretended to make peace with his father, sitting at meat with him, and eating out of the same dish, that Geoffrey might have time to ravage the land unhindered. Geoffrey successfully adopted the same device in order to plunder the churches of Limoges. The wretched strife was only closed at last by the death of the younger Henry in 1183.

His death, however, only opened new anxieties. Richard now claimed to take his brother's place as heir to the imperial dignity, while at the same time he exercised undivided lordship over an important state a position which the king had again and again refused to Henry. Geoffrey, whose over-lord the young king had been, sought to rule Britanny as a dependent of Philip, and his plots in Paris with the French king were only ended by his death in 1185. Philip, on his part, demanded, at the death of the young king, the restoration of Margaret's dowry, the Vexin and Gisors; when Geoffrey died he claimed to be formally recognized as suzerain of Britanny, and guardian of his infant; he demanded that Richard should do homage directly to him as sovereign lord of Aquitaine, and determined to assert his rights over the lands so long debated of Berri and Auvergne. For the last years of Henry's reign disputes raged round these points, and more than once war was only averted by the excitement which swept over Europe at the disastrous news from the Holy Land.

After the death of the young king a precarious peace was established in Aquitaine, and Henry returned to England. In March 1185 he received at Reading the patriarch of Jerusalem and the master of the Hospital, bearing the standard of the kings of the Holy Land, with the keys of the Holy Sepulchre, of the tower of David, and of the city of Jerusalem. "Behold the keys of the kingdom," said the patriarch Heracles with a burst of tears, "which the king and princes of the land have ordered me to give to thee, because it is in thee alone, after God, that they have hope and confidence of salvation." The king reverently received them before the weeping assembly, but handed them back to the safekeeping of the patriarch till he could consult with his barons. He had long been pledged to join the holy war; he had renewed his vow in 1177 and 1181. But it was a heavy burden to be now charged with the crown of Jerusalem. Since the days of his grandfather, Fulk of Anjou, the last strong king of Jerusalem, there had been swift decay. Three of his successors were minors; Antone was a leper; the fifth was repudiated by every one of his vassals. The last forty years had been marked by continual disaster. The armies of the Moslem were closing in fast on every side. A passion of sympathy was everywhere roused by the sorrows of the Holy City. All England, it was said, desired the crusade, and Henry's prudent counting of the cost struck coldly on the excited temper of the time. Gerald of Wales officiously took on himself, in the middle of a hunting party, to congratulate the king on the honour done to him and his kingdom, since the patriarch had passed by the lands of emperors and kings to seek out the English sovereign. Talk of this kind before all the court at such a critical moment much displeased the prudent king, and he answered in his biting way, "If the patriarch, or any other men come to me, they seek rather their own than my gain." The unabashed Gerald still went on, "Thou shouldst think it thy highest gain and honour, king, that thou alone art chosen before all the sovereigns of the earth for so great a service to Christ." "Thus bravely," retorted Henry, "the clergy provoke us to arms and dangers, since they themselves receive no blow in the battle, nor bear any burden which they may avoid!"

Henry's council, however, held firm against the general tide of romantic enthusiasm. In the weighty question of the eastern crown the king had formally and openly pledged himself to act by the advice of his wise men, as no king before him since the Conquest had ever done. An assembly was summoned at Clerkenwell on the 18th of March. No councillors were called from Anjou or Normandy or Aquitaine; the decision was made solely by the advice of the prelates and barons of England. "It seemed to all," declared the council, "to be more fitting, and more for the safety of his soul, that he should govern his kingdom with moderation and preserve it from the irruptions of barbarians and from foreign nations, than that he should in his own person provide for the safety of the eastern nations." The verdict showed the new ideal of kingship which had grown up during Henry's reign, and which made itself deeply felt over the whole land when in the days of his successor the duties of righteous government were thrown aside for the vainglories of religious chivalry. But the patriarch heard the answer with bitter disappointment, and was not appeased by promises of money and forces for the war. "Not thus will you save your soul nor the heritage of Christ," he declared. "We come to seek a king, not money; for every corner of the world sends us money, but not one a prince." And in open court he flung his fierce prophecy at the king, that as till now he had been greatest among the kings of the earth, so henceforth, forsaken by God and destitute of His grace, until his latest breath his glory should be turned into disaster and his honour into shame. Henry, as he rode with the patriarch back to Dover, listened with his strange habitual forbearance while Heraclius poured forth angry reproaches for the iniquities of his whole life, and declared at last that he had almost with his own hands slain St. Thomas. At this the king fiercely turned, with his eyes rolling in a mad storm of passion, and the patriarch bent his head. "Do with me," he cried, "what you did to Thomas. I would rather have my head cut off by you in England than by the Saracens in Palestine, for in truth you are worse than any Saracen!" The king answered with an oath, "If all the men of my kingdom were gathered in one body and spoke with one mouth they would not dare to say this to me." Heraclius pointed scornfully to the train of followers. "Do you indeed think that these men love you—these who care only for your wealth? It is the plunder, and not the man, that this crowd follows after!" Henry spoke of the danger from his sons if he should quit his dominions. "No wonder," was the parting taunt of Heraclius; "from the devil they came, and to the devil they will go."

But Henry was never to come back to England. One day in June a certain Walter of the royal household was terrified by a vision of St. Thomas, who appeared bearing a shining sword which he declared had been newly forged to pierce through the king himself. Walter hurried to the chapel, where Henry was at mass, to tell his tale. Three times the king bent before the altar and signed himself devoutly as though he prayed to the Lord, and then passed to his council chamber. The next day he called Walter to his presence, and sadly shaking his head, spoke with deep sighs, "Walter, Walter, I have felt how cruelly thy sword can strike, for we have lost Chateauroux!" War had in fact broken out in Aquitaine. Toulouse had risen against Richard. Philip, in violation of his treaty, invaded Berri and marched into Auvergne. Hastily gathering an army, Henry crossed to France in a terrible storm. He met Philip at Gisors on the 30th of September, but after three days' bitter strife the kings parted. In November they met again at Bonmoulins in the presence of the Archbishop of Reims, and a great multitude of courtiers and knights. Richard, outraged by the rumour that Henry proposed to give Aquitaine to John, turned suddenly to Philip, while the people crowded round wondering, ungirt his sword, and stretched out his hands to do homage to him for all his father's lands from the Channel to the Pyrenees. His unhappy father started back, stunned by this new calamity, "for he had not forgotten the evil which Henry his son had done to him with the help of King Louis, and this Philip was yet worse than his father Louis." As father and son fell apart the people rushed together, while at the tumult the outer ring of soldiers laid their hands upon their swords, and thus Philip and Richard went out together, leaving Henry alone.

A great solitude had indeed fallen on the old king. His wife was still guarded as a prisoner. Two of his sons had died traitors to their father. A third was in open rebellion. All his daughters were in far-off lands, and one of them was soon to die. Only one son remained to him of all his household, and to him Henry now clung with a great love—the fierce tenacity of an affection that knew no other hope. The king himself was only fifty-six; but he was already an old man, worn out by the prodigious labours and anxieties of forty years. There were moments when a passionate despair settled down on his soul. One day he called his two friends, Baldwin and Hugh, out from the crowd of courtiers to ride beside him, and the bitterness of his heart broke forth, "Why should I revere Christ!" he cried, "why should I think Him worthy of honour who takes from me all honour in my lands, and suffers me to be thus shamefully confounded before that camp follower?" as he called the king of France. Then, as if beside himself, he struck spurs into his horse, and dashed back again into the throng of courtiers.

In the eyes of the world, however, Henry was still the most renowned among the kings of the earth in his unassailable triumph and success. For forty years his reign had been one long triumph. From every difficulty conquered he had gained new strength; every rebellion had left him more unquestioned master. He had never yet known defeat. The Church was now earnest in his support. Papal legates won for him a truce of two months after the conference at Bonmoulins, and when at its close Britanny broke out in revolt, and Richard led an army against his father's lands, the legates again procured peace till after Easter. From February to June of 1189 Henry waited at Le Mans, still confident, it would seem, of peace. Once more legates were appointed to bring about a settlement between the two kings at La Ferte Bernardon the 4th of June. With a fierce outburst of anger Henry passionately refused the demands of Philip. The legate threatened to lay France under an interdict if Philip persisted in war, but Philip only retorted that the Roman Church had no right to interfere between the king of France and his rebel vassals, and added with a sneer that the cardinals already smelt English gold. Then at last Henry abandoned the hope of peace. His treasury was empty, and his lands on both sides of the water had been taxed to the last penny. His troops had melted away in search of more abundant pay. He was shut in between hostile forces—Breton rebels to westward, and the allied armies of Philip and Richard to eastward. The danger roused his old defiant energy. Glanville hurried to England "to compel all English knights, however exhausted and poor, to cross to France," while the king himself, with a few faithful barons and a small body of mercenaries, fell back on Le Mans, swearing that he would never forsake the citizens of the town where he had been born.

The French army, however, followed hard after him. On the 9th of June Philip and Richard halted fifteen miles off Le Mans, on the 11th of June they encamped under its walls. The next day they broke through the handful of troops who desperately held the bridge. A wealthy suburb which could no longer be defended was set on fire, so that it should not give shelter to the enemy, the wind swept the flames into the city, and Henry saw himself shut in between the burning town and the advancing Frenchmen. Then for the first time in his life he turned his back upon his enemies. At the head of 700 horsemen he rode out over a bridge to the north, and fled towards Normandy. As he mounted the spur of a hill two miles off, he turned to look at the flames that rose from the city, and in the bitterness of his humiliation he cursed God—"The city which I have loved best on earth, the city in which I was born and bred, where my father lies buried, where is the body of Saint Julian—this Thou, O God, to the heaping up of my confusion, and to the increase of my shame, hast taken from me in this base manner! I therefore will requite as best I can; I will assuredly rob Thee too of the thing in me which Thou lovest best!"

For twenty miles the king, with his son Geoffrey the chancellor, and a few faithful followers, rode furiously under the burning sun through narrow lanes and broken roads till knights sank and died on the way. Once he was only saved from capture by the breaking of a bridge over a stream which was too deep for the pursuers to ford. Once Count Richard himself followed so hard upon them that he came up with the flying troop. William the marshal turned and raised his lance. "God's feet, marshal, do not kill me!" cried Richard; "I have no hauberk!" William struck his spear into the count's horse, so that it fell dead. "No, I will not kill you. Let the devil kill you!" he shouted with a fierce memory of the old prophecy. By nightfall Henry reached La Frenaye, within a day's ride of the Norman border. He threw himself on a bed, refusing to be undressed, and would scarcely allow Geoffrey to cover him with his own cloak. The next morning he sent his friends forward into Normandy to gather its forces and renew the war. But he himself, in spite of all prayers and warnings, declared that he would go back to Anjou. His passionate emotion threw aside all cold calculations of reason. Every fortress on the way was in the hands of enemies; hostile armies were pressing in on every side; the roads were held by foreign troops,—French and Poitevin, Flemish mercenaries and Breton rebels—as the stricken king rode through the forests and along the trackways he had learned to know as a hunter in earlier days. Never had his indomitable will, his romantic daring, been so great as in this last desperate ride to reach the home of his race. He started on the 13th of June. Before the end of the month Geoffrey had hurried back from Normandy, and together they went to Chinon.

Henry was now shut in on every side. Poitou and Britanny were both in revolt. The forts along the Sarthe, the Loir, and the Loire had fallen into the hands of Philip. On the 30th of June his army was seen under the walls of Tours. Henry himself was on the same day suddenly struck down by fever; unable to meet the French king, he fell back down the river to Saumur. The great French princes, aghast at the swift catastrophe which had fallen, men scarcely knew how, on the Angevin king, trembling lest in this strange victory of the French monarchy his ruin should be the beginning of their own destruction, made a last effort for peace. But Philip stood firm, "seeing that God had delivered his enemy into his hand." On Monday, the 3d of July, the walls of Tours fell before his assault, and he sent a final summons to Henry to meet him at Colombieres, a field near Tours. The king travelled as far as the house of the Templars at Ballan. But there he was seized with intolerable agony in every nerve of his body from head to foot. Leaning for support against a wall in his extreme anguish, he called to him William the marshal, and the pitying bystanders laid him on a bed. News of his illness was carried to the French camp. But Richard felt no touch of pity. His father was but feigning some excuse to put off the meeting, he told Philip; and a message was sent back commanding him to appear on the next day. The sick king again called the marshal, and prayed him at whatever labour to carry him to the conference. "Cost what it may," he vowed, "I will grant whatever they ask to get them to depart. But this I tell you of a surety, if I can but live I will heal the country from war, and win my land back again." With a final effort of his indomitable will he rode on the 4th of July through the sultry summer heat to Colombieres. The great assembly gathered to witness the triumph of France was struck with horror at the marks of suffering on his face, and Philip himself, moved by a sudden pity, called for a cloak to be spread on the ground on which the king might sit. But Henry's fierce temper flashed out once more; he would not sit, he said; even as he was he would hear what they asked of him, and why they cut short his lands. Then Philip stated his demands. Henry must do homage, and place himself wholly at the French king's mercy to do whatever he should decree. Richard must receive, as Henry's heir, the fealty of the barons of the lands on both sides the sea. A heavy sum was to be paid to Philip for his conquests in Berri. Richard and Philip were to hold Le Mans and Tours, and the other castles of Maine and Touraine, or else the castles of the Vexin, until the treaty was completely carried out. Henry's barons were to swear that they would force him to observe these terms.

As Henry hesitated for a moment at these crushing demands, a sudden terrible thunder broke from the still air. Both kings fell back with superstitious awe, for there had been no warning cloud or darkness. After a little space they again went forward, and again out of the serene sky came a yet louder and more awful peal. Henry, half fainting with suffering, was only prevented from falling to the ground by the friends who held him up on horseback while he made his submission to his rival and accepted the terms of peace. Then for the last time he spoke with his faithless son Richard. As the formal kiss of peace was given, the count caught his father's fierce whisper, "May God not let me die until I have worthily avenged myself on thee!" The terrible words were to Richard only a merry tale, with which on his return he stirred the French court to great laughter.

Henry was carried back the same day in a litter to Chinon. So sudden and amazing a downfall was to the superstitious terror of the time, evident token that the curse of Thomas had come to rest on him. The vengeance of the implacable martyr seemed to follow him through every act of the great drama. In Philip's scornful refusal to allow Henry to swear obedience, "saving his honour and the dignity of his kingdom," the zealots of the day saw a just retribution. At Chinon a deputation of monks from Canterbury met him. "Trusting that in his affliction he might pity the affliction of the Church," and grant demands long urged by the convent, they had sought him out, "going through swords." "The convent of Canterbury salutes you as their lord," they began, as they forced their way into the sick king's presence. Henry broke in with bitter indignation, "Then lord I have been, and am still, and will be yet—small thanks to you, ye evil traitors!" he added in a lower voice, which just caught the ears of the furious monks. But he listened patiently to their complaint. "Now go out," he said, "I will speak with my faithful servants." As the monks passed out one of them stopped and laid his curse on the king, who trembled and grew pale at the terrible words. "The omnipotent God of His ineffable mercy, and for the merits of the blessed martyr Thomas, if his life and passion has been well pleasing to Him, will shortly do us justice on thy body." Tortured with suffering, Henry still summoned strength for his last public act. He called his clerk and dictated a letter to Canterbury, to urge patience till his return, when he would consider their complaint and find a way out of the difficulty. The same evening his chancellor, whom he had sent to Philip at Tours, returned with the list of those who had conspired against him Henry bade him read the names. "Sire," he said, "may Jesus Christ help me! the first name which is written here is the name of Count John your son." The king started up from his pillow. "Is it true," he cried, "that John, my very heart, whom I have loved beyond all my sons, and for whose gain I have brought upon me all this misery, has forsaken me?" Then he laid himself down again and turned his face to the wall. "Now you have said enough," he said. "Let all the rest go as it will, I care no more for myself nor for the world." From this time he grew delirious. But still in the intervals of his ravings the great passionate nature, the defiance, the unconquered will broke out with inextinguishable force. He cursed the day on which he was born, and called down Heaven's vengeance on his sons. The great king's pride was bowed in the extremity of his ruin and defeat. "Shame," he muttered constantly, "shame on a conquered king." Geoffrey watched by him faithfully, and the dying king's last thoughts turned to him with grateful love. On the 6th of July, the seventh day of his illness, he was seized with violent hemorrhage, and the end came almost instantaneously. The next day his body was borne to Fontevraud, where his sculptured tomb still stands. To the astonished onlookers at the great tragedy, the grave in a convent church, separated from the tombs of his Angevin forefathers and of his Norman ancestors, far from his English kingdom, seemed part of the strange disasters foretold by Merlin and inspired messengers. But no ruler of his age had raised for himself so great a monument as Henry. Amid the ruin that overwhelmed his imperial schemes, his realm of England stood as the true and lasting memorial of his genius. Englishmen then, as Englishmen now, taught by the "remembrance of his good times," recognized him as one of the foremost on the roll of those who have been the makers of England's greatness.

THE END